Month: February 2018

The isolation of a job in corrections can leave many feeling out of sight and out of mind. And being out of sight and out of mind tends to allow certain things to go unaddressed. A general consensus I have noticed when talking with CO’s has been that they believe no one cares about their wellbeing and that workplace bullying and bad behavior is at an all time high. Just listening to these stories is enough to make you cry, but I have to ask: What is wrong with us that we have become so cold as to not care about a fellow officer? When did backstabbing, gossip, and all around bad behavior in the workplace become acceptable? Of course perception and reality may be two different things, but if so many CO’s are feeling this way, doesn’t that say something? If it doesn’t, it should.

Every critical incident has similarities, and differences. In addition, every law enforcement officer’s reaction to an incident is individual as well. Some officers go through the process of integrating the experience into their psyche without difficulty. Usually this is with the help of others (peer group counseling, debriefings). It is difficult to an effectively process an incident alone. The family is one of the primary contacts for processing stressful incidents. But what can the family possibly do to help the officer?

Something that is not recognized by many in the civilian world is that our First Responders as a whole are more psychologically healthy than the general population at the time of hiring. How can I say this? Well, very few careers require the psychological screening and assessment that First Responders have to pass in order to obtain their job. In doing such a screening, the hope is to protect the public from someone who is unsafe, but the hidden benefit is to hopefully protect the individual doing the job from many of the psychological disorders that can develop from this type of work. So, if we use the premise that First Responders are more psychologically healthy than their civilian counterpart, why are we seeing the psychological problems we are seeing within First Responders? Problems like substance abuse, high divorce rates and suicide? Theoretically, this should not be happening, but it is rampant. Why?